A little while back, The Organizer made the rather controversial and unsettling statement that socially driven artwork is not helpful to the political campaigns they might indirectly relate to. I’m not backpedaling from that point, but I would like to extend the subtext of that post a little bit. The subtext was this: socially conscious work is only relevant as art, but art that is made as a part of and a contributor to a campaign and its actions really can help (you just have to compromise your work to an external objective if you want it to matter politically, which will inevitably make it less credible artistically).
If you want to make art (or creative work) that fits into a campaign, we could use you.
In fact, I’m going to get really real here for a minute, and I might just piss some people off. We could really use more artists who do a good job of communication to low-literacy communities.
We Organizers draw up a lot of fact sheets and text heavy fliers. It isn’t even that we lack the skills to make more visually driven fliers and handouts, necessarily. We don’t have the time for it, and it’s that simple. We all type fast so we type and we change some fonts and slap our logos on and run them to Kinko’s, you know?
Screenprinters, draughtsmen, graphics designers, comic artists — we could really use you guys in the movement. If you could help us make materials that we can give to people directly on the street that communications the issues in a less text heavy way, it could be very good.
There are good groups out there doing some nice work. The Indy Media effort is really growing by leaps and bounds. One of my favorite things that I see the Indy Media folks doing is making a lot more video. This is good in campaigns where you reach a lot of people who have breached the digital divde (and more and more folks are breaching it every day). They are making a lot of great YouTuble’able and Email’able videos.
Still, though, the best of organizing is still face to face and you don’t want to sit someone in front of computer screen during a first time housemeeting. We need more old media, 8.5″ X 11″, duplicatable media that we can just hand people. That grabs them or makes them laugh.
That’s the art that could really help the effort to organize people into larger campaigns that mean something.
It’s not that artists aren’t contributing now, but the Organizer sees most of them contributing to the political efforts with hipster cred. Efforts like the anti-war movement, vegetarianism, bicycling… all good stuff, all important stuff. I can’t remember the last time I saw an artist really getting involved in helping turn people out in a poor people’s campaign.
As an organizer of the poor and disenfranchised, the Organizer is going to argue to his friends in the arts community that we need you more here than the hipster causes do. We need you to help communicate the complex economic issues to the folks with the least education, to help them see the need to turnout and speakout against the force that degrade their neighborhoods.
The vegans and the bike couriers all have a copy of “The Beat Reader” in their shoulder bags, you know? Those efforts just don’t need your skills as badly as we do.
Find us. Help us communicate. If you come to the cause and plug your art directly into the campaign, you can help. You really can.
If you’ve been involved in a political group for a long time, you may have noticed a pattern: the group always attacks problems the exact same way. Maybe it always does press conferences. Maybe it always does rallies. Maybe it always goes and meets with the politician it’s closest to. Or maybe it’s good at getting in the paper, so that’s what it always does.
Are you frustrated by that? You should be. That’s just sort of how groups work. Groups are naturally conservative — that is, groups don’t like change. When a group gets comfortable with an approach, that’s what it does.
So if you’re frustrated, you’re just going to get more frustrated if you go to meetings of the group and suggest change their. During meetings, people don’t function as individuals, they function as members of a group. They will be guarded about saying things that others will disagree with. They will tend to think in terms of B.T.W.W.H.A.D. (BUT THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE). In fact, it’s better to say “it will tend to think” because at meetings, most people function as members of a group mind.
So if you want to get your group to do something different, you need to plan ahead.
The next time you know you’re group is likely to take action on some issue and you don’t want to see it do the same old thing, I recommend the following action steps:
- 1. Brainstorm the course of action you’d like to take and why.
- 2. Make a list of members of the group that tend to listen to you or that others listen to.
- 3. Pick several of them to talk to before the meeting, then call them up. Try to talk to them face-to-face if possible, but over the phone can work, too.
- 4. Tell them you foresee the need for the group to tackle some issue, and you wanted to brainstorm about solutions with them ahead of time.
- 5. Try to guide them to come up with your new strategy, but try to be open-minded about ideas he or she comes up with, too. You may find that when you speak to others individually that they will have ideas for new tactics as well. Their idea might be better than yours. If so, buy in and affirm their idea. Encourage them to speak up about it.
- 6. Try to get the other person to broach the idea first, and decide on an appropriate time in the meeting for them to bring it up.
- 6.5 Try to have the same conversation with other people and lead them to roughly the same conclusion.
- 7. When they bring up the new tactic in the meeting, chime in your support.
- 8. If your allies don’t bring it up, then you should.
- 9. Guide the conversation to logistics ASAP, so that people start taking on tasks. Follow up with those people to help them get their tasks done. It will be harder this time because your group has not done it this way before!
- 2. Make a list of members of the group that tend to listen to you or that others listen to.
I can’t promise it will work, but I can promise it will get you further than springing all new approaches on a group in a meeting. Eventually, you’ll get thought of as a sort of loose cannon, or at least someone who has “wacky ideas.”
Generally speaking, different problems do call for different tactics. And, at the very least, groups learn from trying out different approaches, so it’s worth doing anyway. The question is, how do you bring the group around.
The important thing to remember is that people don’t really follow ideas. They follow people, but until you convince them to follow you they are going to futz about with ideas. In order to get them to follow you, you have to give them room to grow and think. That’s why when you launch a coalition, you have to keep it loose.
I’ve worked in coalitions in towns across America. I’ve seen them work. I’ve seen them fail. I’ve seen very powerful people convene them and go nowhere. I’ve seen near nobodies eventually win everyone to their table and rock the house. A big difference is whether or not they keep it loose.
You can’t control coalitions entirely. They are ungainly monsters who don’t stay on message or consistent or follow perfectly. To win them over and win their trust, you have to keep it loose. You have to permit members to follow courses you are unsure about, you have to let multiple things happen at once, you have to let people argue. As long as it all stays civil and loose and you keep reaching out, it will grow.
You don’t often see business leaders joining progressive coalitions, even when it’s in their interest. I think it’s because on some level they can’t stand the loosey goosey nature. You know, in the business world, when something needs doing, you tell someone to do it and it’s done. In the coalition world, if something needs doing and no one volunteers, you’re sort of out of luck (of course, that’s sort of your fault, as the leader, for not anticipating it and asking someone quietly to consider doing it before the meeting).
There’s a lot of talk in the political world about being on message, staying tight, clear tactics and a well-honed agenda. I see a lot of young people try to bring these ideas to the table when they launch coalitions. It’s bogus. If you’re going to work with a bunch of people who don’t have to be there with you, then you have to keep it loose, open and flexible or you lose them.
We often feel so under fire in this life that sometimes even good news just feels like more work. Say you make a breakthrough in a campaign, a target gives some ground, your people are a little better off. The temptation is to just push on to the next phase, to start marshalling your forces because there is still more to do. Issue a press release and make sure your fundraiser gets it.
Take it from me, though — you need to pick up your phone and call your leaders. Even if you don’t get them all, even if you just leave a bunch of voice mails, it’s good. It makes you feel better. It makes them feel better. They’ll listen to your message and hear you got the meeting, or that someone got a job, or they hired them back, or your going to get one of your demands, and they will smile and they will probably thank you the next time they see you.
But you’ll get ahold of one or two of them. You know you will. Someone is always home. He or she will say how good it is, tell you how they feel and you’ll get a chance to organize them a little deeper. You’ll remember what the good work is in this work, the real work, and you’ll feel better.
It’s hard to feel good in this life sometimes, but if you pick up the phone from time to time, just to spread a little news, you’ll feel better.
It’s easy to get lazy when you’re working among the underclass. The thing is, so many of the people and groups you interact with have so little power that you don’t ever expect any of them to really be against you. After all, everyone is trying to carve out there little piece of good in this modest world of advocacy/organizing/activism — what’s to fight over?
So you get lazy. And sometimes you can really get broadsided by a group you’d assume to be an ally going after you like you were the worst possible enemy.
Your friendly neighborhood Organizer has been working on a nice local campaign, and doing it to some degree alongside some neighborhood groups around the city. These local groups address these campaigns all the time, we just deal with it on occassion. On the other hand, we bring more historical clout to the table, a larger base and more strategic thinking. The groups were sharing a problem that we saw as a problem, too, and asked us to be part of the solution.
And we were. In fact, it’s fair to say that in about six weeks we had the problem solved. A little event, a little media attention, some well placed phone calls and it was done.
We had more we wanted to do, and when one of the local groups I hadn’t dealt with much before invited me to come out and talk about what we were up to, I just sort of assumed it would be another supportive audience. This group was so much like all the others I’d met with in the past and they had all been so excited to be part of the effort – why should this be any different?
Wow, was it different.
I was waylaid. In fact, I was told that if we won the campaign that we were waging we risked actually losing it. The campaign was to support a series of institutions in the city – we’ll say they were rec centers. There is a certain number of these rec centers and we wanted to increase all of their services by a certain percent. This group I met with told me that we could win the increase in services, but see a corresponding closure of rec centers to make up for the cost.
What?
It was an objection so far out in left field, especially coming from an ally, that I had no preparation for it. It’s like someone telling you that pedestrians are actually safer walking down the middle of boulevards than they are on the sidewalk: it’s such nonsense that there is not a logical way to discuss it.
And, of course, I’d come in with the wrong attitude from the start. I assumed I was coming to see supporters. Instead, I’d been invited to a kangaroo court.
So the lesson here is this: always make sure you know who’s in the room before you go. Even if the room is filled with other powerless people, just like the ones you organize day-by-day. There’s a good chance someone is against you. Or, at the very least, someone who doesn’t like what you’re doing has gotten to the people you are trying to organize first.
It’s not a rule I’m great at following. I tend to be an Organizer who functions on instinct. In fact, as a general rule, I won’t meet with groups unless I already know they are on my side. Groups are conservative and hard to convince. Individuals are not. Usually, I will only meet with a board or organization if I already have a number of allies among its members. In this case, I’d gotten lazy because I’d met with so much previous success.
In this case, it felt very unpleasant and wasted nearly half-a-day, a week-and-a-half out from a major rally. I should have looked into it all better. It looks as though one of my opponents on the issue got to this group before and me, and I was out-organized. At least that means that the campaign is going well enough that someone feels threatened. Bully for the home-team.
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